Is it still necessary to define art by intent and context? The gallery
world would have us believe this to be the case, but the internet tells
a more mutable story. Contrary to the long held belief that art needs
intent and context, I suggest that if we look outside of galleries,
we’ll find the actions, events and people that create contemporary art
with or without the art world’s label.

Over the past 20 years, the theory Relational Aesthetics (referred to in
this essay as RA) has interpreted social exchanges as an art form.
Founding theoretician Nicholas Bourriaud describes this development as
“a set of artistic practices that take as their theoretical and
practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their
social context”[1]. In reality, art erroneously known to typify RA’s
theorization hasn’t strayed far from the model of the 1960’s Happening,
an event beholden to the conventions of the gallery and the direction of
its individual creator. In her essay Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics, Claire Bishop describes Rikrit Tiravanija’s dinners as
events circumscribed in advance, using their location as a crutch to
differentiate the otherwise ordinary action of eating a meal as art[2].
A better example of the theory of RA succinctly put into action can be
seen in anonymous group activities on the internet, where people form
relations and meaning without hierarchy.

Started in 2003, 4Chan.org is one such site, and host to 50 image
posting message boards, (though one board in particular, simply titled
‘/b/’, is responsible for originating many of the memes we use to burn
our free time.) The site’s 700,000 daily users post and comment in
complete anonymity; a bathroom-stall culture generating posts that
alternate between comedic brilliance, virulent hate and both combined.
Typically, the content featured is a NSFW intertextual gangbang of
obscure references and in-jokes where images are created, remixed,
popularized and forgotten about in a matter of hours. 4Chan keeps no
permanent record of itself, making an in the moment experience the
allure of participation. For all of the memes that have leaked into our
inbox from it, 4Chan maintains a language, ethics and set of activities
that would be incomprehensible to the unfamiliar viewer. Induction to
/b/’s world is not fortified and understanding it merely requires Google
searching its litany of acronymated terms or participating regularly
enough to find out for yourself.

“It is up to us as beholders of art to bring [unforeseen associations]
to light, […] to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce
in the specific contexts they inhabit” [3] concludes Bourriaud in his
2001 book, Postproduction. One of the unforeseen relationships he
mentions is that of the contemporary artist and contributive internet
surfer­ (the kind of Photoshop bandit you can find on /b/). Bourriaud
understands each as methodological equals, calling them “semionauts”. He
uses this term to define those who create pathways through culture by
reorganizing history to bring forward new ideas[4]. In a digital
environment equally defined by information categorizing and shopping, a
case for surfing-as-art neatly falls between two historical precedents:
Duchamp’s specification-as-art and 1980’s artists’ (such as Jeff Koons,
Sherrie Levine, or Heim Steinbach) interest in consumption-as-art.
Surfing-as-art and RA both enact Peter Bürger’s description of the
avant-garde’s intention to merge everyday life with the aesthetic realm.

The older the club the more convoluted the semiotics of
communication between surfers becomes. This communication entails
posting organized content by a challenger, and a decoding of it by other
participants, who respond with a posting where both syntagms and
paradigms of the challenge post are identified and playfully manipulated.[5]

The medium, practice and logic of surf clubs outlined in Ramocki’s essay
matches 4Chan’s /b/ message board identically, though the circumstances
are obviously different. While /b/ anonymously concerns itself with
people and events popularized on the internet, the individuals who
manage surf clubs have social and professional connections to the art
world, making their primary point of reference art historical. Reference
should not be the sole criteria for understanding surfing-as-art,
however. Ramocki, like Bourriaud, premises his belief in surfing-as-art
not on the type of allusions made in content, but on the production
method of a post and its network environment. Both describe this
environment as continuously active, altering or re-contextualizing
information and making it public with hope for further use by peers.

Zach Anner's attempt to host his own television show on Oprah's new
television network through an online contest she hosted was supported by
/b/ unironically

With this condition in mind, it’s fair to call /b/ a massive surf club
whose conceptual language is determined by those without connections to
the art world or the need for validation from it. As artist and blogger
Eryk Salvaggio puts it, “The net can’t handle the pretense of art, or
anything that seems manufactured, because it has a keen bullshit
mechanism.”[6] Though /b/ doesn’t need us, contemporary art does need a
dose of /b/’s refined understanding of actively anonymous group creation
for us to advance the “bullshit” we cherish.

This notion of ongoing use in surf clubs is also fundamental to RA’s
attempt to create an art that takes place through the continuous social
interactions participants have within an environment. Ramocki describes
surf clubs as more than a dump site for disparate images, but as a
location where highly specific visual languages are formed and conversed
in. This corresponds with Bourriaud’s description of the future of
Relational art;

artists intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond
what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an
ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of use of forms, a
culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal:
sharing.[7]

From this quote we can draw another relationship: /b/ and other surf
clubs are digital examples of Relational Aesthetics, artforms that rely
on social interaction and feedback to take place. But before /b/ can
totally fall under the hood of RA, there is one last hurdle in aligning
it with Bourriaud’s theory. Relational Aesthetics reflected Bourriaud’s
distrust for technology, a feeling so deep he even criticized automatic
public toilets as instruments that distance the public from itself.
Bourriaud saw the 1990’s generation’s drive to initiate an art
consisting of intimate human relations as a reaction to the disembodying
effects of the digital age.

These theories are now out of date. Understanding our only ‘real’
relations as those that occur through physical encounters becomes
arbitrary when considering the behavioral and situational norms each
physical encounter presents. Each of these norms acts as an intermediary
between others and ourselves (though some would argue these norms do not
regulate, but are our personalities). Like the digital world, physical
interaction is full of socially bound ‘interfaces’, operating methods
that determine the substance of relationships. As any millennial can
attest, the idea that there is an in-person ‘real’ version of you that
comprises your full identity and an online personage that bears no
impact on your ‘real’ self, isn’t an accurate description of
contemporary life. The inclusion of digital sites of interaction as a
development of Relational Aesthetics is an idea not so strange
considering the method’s practitioners’ past interest in the economics
of mass exchange, intermediary points of being during travel and the
collision of global cultures.

An expansion into the digital world could also help clarify RA in
practice; it is a theory with an open disdain for art’s commodification,
though is often exhibited within the shelter of an art institution. This
discrepancy was best articulated, oddly enough, by dealer Gavin Brown,
sharply saying in an interview with the BBC:

Don’t you think that if you wanted to look at the possibilities of
an art that’s theoretical horizons encompass the realm of human
interactions in a social context, wouldn’t you want to just go out and
meet people and have a good life? I mean, to me it seems as though a lot
of this work is made by people who are scared to live life in the first
place– incredibly unradical people[8] who play a game of a radical life
in the safe confines of some Kunsthalle or other museum in Germany or
France.[9]

Despite Bourriaud’s interest in collaborative art making, his theory’s
purest realization has been put on hold by institutions that must place
emphasis on individual creators to maintain their financial well-being.
While inside of a Liam Gillick exhibit, have you ever forgot that you
were attending a Liam Gillick exhibit? I haven’t. Ending the
viewer/creator dichotomy requires no less than the end of the art-star
system and a participation format that makes room for the errors
inherent in free will. In his essay Postchronist Manifestation, Dominick
Chen states

as long as there exists an asymmetry (or distance) between producer
and receiver, the modality of cultural production would inevitably lead
back to a religious power structure.[10]

An art of Relational Aesthetics “far from the classical mythology of the
solitary effort”[11] would be anonymously produced and give all
participants the greatest degree of choice possible when determining the
course of their own experience. Here we arrive again at 4Chan.

After videos of a teen beating his cat (named Dusty) surfaced on
Youtube, it took /b/ a day to track down the anonymous abuser and have
him arrested

In addition to the constantly evolving visual and textual language on
4Chan’s message boards, there is another /b/ activity that exemplifies
group production in line with RA’s theory. These activities are called
‘raids’– projects where a person or institution is chosen and a mass of
anonymous people contribute to bringing on the manipulation of its
digital existence.

While a surf club may screen capture and edit material in Photoshop to
post to their board, /b/’s raids are concerned with bringing on an
evolving change in the source itself, not a visualized hypothetical.
Surf-clubs have a Relational structure of communication among members,
but they still maintain the individual creation of static art within a
designated space. In contrast, raids are a breach of boundaries—a way of
altering the work’s ‘real life’. William S. Burrough’s proposition that
art manifest itself (“What if a painting of a bomb exploded in a
gallery?”) is fitting for raids[12]. These site-specific alterations may
take place through cracking passwords, using the open editing features
on a website like Wikipedia, or hacking. Sometimes they even take place
in person.

Raids have no leaders and the course of their action is decided by the
collective will(s) of all participants. Without a chain of command, a
raid is an event constantly in flux. They may end before they even start
or begin with one plan of action and later morph into many splintering
reactions. A raid’s anti-hierarchical fragmentation is similar to the
antagonism Claire Bishop describes in Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics. Separate from the temporary microtopias attempted by some RA
artists, Bishop calls the social works of art that reveal natural
oppositions between participants an example of relational antagonism.
She explains that this art making is a way of “exposing that which is
repressed in sustaining the semblance of harmony.”[13]

Antagonism is a byproduct of free choice and speech– an inefficient but
necessary way of relating if a project wishes to remain as open as
possible. 4Chan users tend to value personal liberty above all, making
the prime targets of their raids people or companies who engage in
censorship or moral zealotry[14]. Disgust for authority is so engrained
in /b/’s culture of anonymity that users who attempt to demand raids for
their own personal gain have became the target of backlash attacks
themselves. While some group interventions are petty, others are thought
provoking and intelligently executed, like 2009’s mARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME
raid, which is /b/’s finest work yet.

When TIME Magazine offered 4Chan’s founder, m00t, as a candidate for
2009’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year online readership poll,
/b/ wasted no time launching an attack to propel him to the top spot.
The resulting campaign included likely thousands of participants’ manual
labor, the creation and dispersion of sophisticated ballot-stuffing
software programs and several strategic changes[15] in online
manipulation methods from March to April of 2009. m00t not only took
first place, but all of the top 21 people listed in the poll were
intentionally ordered in such a way that their first names spelled out a
secret message: ‘mARBLE CAKE ALSO THE GAME’[16]. ‘Marble cake’ is
alternately described as the name of the chat room where the
anti-Scientology raid Project Chanology was born, or as an unsanitary
sex act. ‘The game’ is an inside joke that requires you to not utter or
think of it to be able to win. You mostly likely just lost the game.

The mARBLE CAKE raid was an impulsive assembly of a group to
simultaneously make reflexive commentary while literally revising who
the public thought they voted to be the most powerful that year. The
ranked influence of the names listed in the top 21 becomes subservient
to the order of /b/’s encrypted message. This echoes the commonly
launched criticism of TIME’s yearly “Influential” issue that many of the
people included are merely entertaining figureheads or patsies who act
at the behest of even more powerful, discrete interests. More
specifically, the raid is a work of Relational Aesthetics. Just as the
empty bottles left over from Rikrit Taravanija’s meals are later used as
sculptures in their own right, the resulting alteration of TIME’s poll
becomes a digital monument to /b/’s successfully group-orchestrated
intervention. /b/’s influence on Time magazine’s website is the
Relational given form through their own activity.

What we witness by looking at the mARBLE CAKE raid is the result of a
group of computer programmers who used their knowledge to make a mockery
of a flawed media structure without retaining individual credit for
themselves. With this equally creditless result, I’m reminded of the
symmetrical creativity Dominick Chen calls for in his essay Postchronist
Manifestation. Chen situates Relational Aesthetics as the second to most
current form of art making in history. The newest, he claims, is
as-of-yet unmade, though differs from RA in that it is created and
interpreted collectively without hierarchy. This ‘new’ form of art does
not exist inside of traditional institutions and confronts the
conditions of its participants’ lives within their own environment. What
Chen describes is in fact Relational Aesthetics as ideally theorized by
Bourriaud, highlighting the contradiction between the reality of RA’s
art-star-filled, institutionally reified present incarnation and the
hope for an emancipatory future inherent in RA’s theory. Chen calls this
‘new’ form of art ‘X’ but he might as well have named it /b/.

[15] Because the poll took account of both the number of votes and the
average rating of influence (a number up to 100 at best), the ballot
stuffing software distributed among participants needed to take use
complicated algorithms to insure each of the 21 names would stay high or
low enough on the list for the mARBLE CAKE message to be spelled
properly. As the raid continued, TIME caught on to these attempts and
upped their security measures. Throughout the month the
mARBLECAKEALSOTHEGAME message became illegible many times, forcing
raiders to adopt new methods to combat Captcha Codes and time
restrictions. As the amount of manual labor increased, many lost
interest in the project and moved on. Participants came and went all
throughout the raid– free choice includes the possibility of refusal.
All images shamelessly stolen from Encyclopedia Dramatica, except for
the ones stolen from Google image search.